9 Remarketing Tactics To Grow Your Business

Remarketing may be relatively new to the digital marketing world but it is fast becoming an essential tool to supplement ppc meaning that it warrants its own budget slice. It allows the marketer to recapture the specific interest of that high-end target market who visited your website, even if they left without purchasing or leaving their contact details. To put it another way you can continue marketing to the prospective client after they have left the shop.

How does it work?

Businesses can use remarketing in a variety of ways. In particular, platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and third-party services AdRoll or Perfect Audience can be used to build ‘audiences’ of prospects.

Visitors are tracked by the cookies placed on their device after visiting your website. In order to track these people – known collectively as the remarketing ‘audience’ – code is added to your website, which places a cookie (or piece of code used to identify them) on their browser.

Where that cookie placement occurs will depend on the pages visited and what factor of the sales conversion process you wish to monitor. Taking Google as an example, the tracking then links in with your Google Ad campaigns. As a result, an ad will appear on future external website pages visited by the prospective client. It will be specific to the product or service they were interested in buying and designed to negate the reason they did not buy. Or it will seek to reengage them in some other way.

Clearly this can add a powerful tool to your online marketing armoury. But all too often tagging and ad creation are haphazard and are not properly thought out. Here are some essential tips to streamline your campaign and maximise resulting leads and conversions:

1. The goal you create will determine how your campaign is structured

Bounce stats – or prospects who leave quickly without checking out your website – can be both depressing and enlightening whichever way you look at them, but on their own they are not enough to create robust targeting goals. Apart from looking at which pages visitors have left your site from, you’ll need a clear idea as to the direction of the ad campaign. This will involve determining which type of visitor, funnel, pages, product or service to target. This could depend on where the visitor has decided to leave, what product or service they were interested in buying, location of the visitor or which pages are hot landing pages.
Additionally, you will need to consider the source of traffic. If the means by which visitors arrive at your site and the message they receive immediately on landing are not congruent, they will leave quickly most of the time.

Determine which type of client you are going to target first and structure your approach from there.

2. Create ad groups to target various visitor needs

You will find visitors have left the conversion funnel on different pages. Some may have only been viewing information pages when they left. Segmenting the ad campaign into micro remarketing campaigns (ie, ad groups) will allow you to focus on the requirements of individual types of visitors. Create different ad group to target those unique needs. For instance, a visitor who has left the buying cycle on the ‘delivery’ page may be enticed by an ad that offers a discount on postage. A visitor who left on the price page may be enticed further by a time-restricted sale offer.

3. Time is of the essence

You also need a clear vision of the duration of your ad campaign, and what budget you will assign to each segment within it. To determine the latter, you’ll need an idea how long you follow each visitor with the ad campaign. Google is set to a default of 3 months, and Facebook 180 days, but this can be changed to suit your ad group. A shorter period of 30 days is great for retail; it catches the visitor with their original desire in mind but does not batter them to death with the idea.

4. Use different sizes for your ad

As much as the content of the ad highlights individual visitor groups, it is also important not to forget the shape and size of the ad itself. Each site that your ad will be seen on within the Google ad network may call for a unique size or shape so it is important to cover this eventuality by creating ads in more than one guise.

5. Hot traffic needs a higher budget

It is difficult to know which product or service a visitor was interested in when they have bounced from the home page or a page more to do with information or brand awareness. The visitors who will be easier to convert are those who have travelled partly down the conversion funnel already. So this is where you should be spending your budget. To balance the campaign, reduce outlay on home page and non-converting pages. Also, target this audience to re-provoke that interest by using blogs and webinars.

There is a school of thought that says why waste budget on clients who are going to buy from you anyway. But use the ads to keep your brand top of mind.

6. Click bait to entice your visitors back

When visitors have fallen away in the conversion process, more aggressive ads that talk of discounts, savings and special offers are called for. Clearly, these visitors know what the product is and they need that extra prod to make the sale. Discounts need to be linked primarily to those specific products or services visitors almost converted on. This could be something such as ‘20% off until end of November’ or ‘15% off for first-time buyers’.

7. Think long-term and don’t forget brand awareness

Don’t forget visitors who visit one or two pages and disappear. Especially the ones who perhaps visit your information pages a lot. This type of visitor is becoming loyal to your site and needs a more nurturing ad that pushes brand awareness and links to a page offering free information, an eBook or white paper. They may not be the first to convert but you are enhancing brand awareness and loyalty as well as playing the long-game to a conversion in the future.

If your business model allows, consider a remarketing campaign that gets some more information about them, whether this is an email address or some kind of steer on what products or services they are interested in. You can then design more closely targeted offerings for them.

8. Don’t over-egg the pudding

A word of warning. Re-targeting can irritate people. If they are seeing the same ad for the same product again and again, they can start to feel as if they are being stalked. (Think of the over-zealous shop assistant when you just want to browse). You need to get the frequency of the ads right. Through the Google ads remarketing dashboard, you can set how often they are seen over a month, day or week. For more ‘urgent’ ads offering a discount within a set period, it might be necessary to be more frequent but be careful of over-exposure.

9. Refresh those tired ads

For the same reason make sure you refresh those ads you have been using a long time. They may not cause downright irritation but they may lose that powerful message and engaging quality when seen too often. They just become part of the web page ‘furniture’ and are not given a second look. Think about re-writing content or changing the images to keep it enticing.

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RICHARD TALBOT Head of Paid Search

An experienced digital marketer with 8+ years of industry experience, Richard has worked in client account management at both Google AdWords and Microsoft's Bing Ads in Dublin. He now leads the Paid Search & Display Advertising team at Tinderpoint delivering successful campaigns for a portfolio of diverse national and international clients across many industries.